In Laing’s view, schizophrenia is not a malfunction…rather a kind of “voyage of self-discovery” [or "personal rediscovery"] which represents an attempt to heal the wounds a sick society has inflicted on [the schizophrenic]…Schizophrenia is an attempt at a mental rebirth
Gleitman, cited in Archibald
Coakes lay alone on the deserted road.
‘Happy?,’ he asked you.
‘Well?’
With one hand, swollen and crooked where the cop had stood on it, crunching something delicate inside, he wiped the curdled urine and vomit from his mouth and eyes. With difficulty he rolled over to his side, felt the nauseating warmth where he’d soiled himself shift and ooze as he shuffled to his feet. With his good hand he opened the car door and perched on the frame, panting. Awkwardly he stripped off his slacks and tossed them through into the back. He peeled his underwear off over socks and shoes, careful to avoid the lumpy turd hidden in the seat. Balling his y-fronts, he slipped the soggy mass into the Saabs roomy glove compartment. Coakes sat, butt naked, and watched the desert.
‘Well are you? Happy I mean?’
With the curled fingers of his injured hand he touched his soft chode, lost between wide gray haunches.
‘Does it please you,’ he continued, ‘to see me humbled like this?’
Coakes stood awkwardly, and shuffled his tall body into the car. Conscious of skid marks but powerless to prevent them, he settled heavily into the hot sticky seat and set off - pulling the car off-road and bumping his way, half naked and stinking of piss, into the desert.
I’ll have to fumigate the car, he thought savagely. I’ll have to hire a professional team, with expensive specialist equipment, to sterilise each aging crevice and stretch of unclean fabric. But not before, he thought - figuring the road was far enough out of site behind, and that the close surroundings lacked anywhere conspicuous for someone to hide, and breaking to a slow halt - not before I clean it out myself, ensure that thing hasn’t leaked from it’s double bagged enclosure.
Bending to open the trunk, he winced at a jolt where the cop had kicked his side, maybe cracking a rib. The refuse bag was heavier than he remembered, difficult to shift with one hand. It caught on the latch of the boot, dug into the toothed lip, and for a moment he feared the bag would burst; that his situation would become infinitely worse for a moments carelessness. The bag slushed monstrously, the plastic cold and hateful against his unclothed groin; like some grotesque fetish underpant.
Coakes set the fire twenty feet from the car, twenty feet further into the desert; used half the gallon drum of petrol to light it with a complimentary match book from McDowells. In the flames, things cracked and sizzled, and from it, a great heavy smog rose. A signal visible for miles about, black and oily. Unavoidable. The smell of gas and meat reminded Coakes of childhood barbeques on South Beach, seagulls and domestic cats, skinned and roasting sumptuously. His mouth watered. He handled himself and considered jerking off into the dancing flames, but decided it would be tasteless.
After the fire had died, Coakes poked through the remains with his rusted saw. A couple of bones had retained their shape. A femur that he stamped to pieces, and a section of jaw, complete with teeth. The rest was a scattered black pit of bone and plastic fragments. Gingerly he dug the jaw from the hot embers and pulling his arm back like a star pitcher, threw if far out into the sand. The desert would take care of it he thought, as he buried the fires remnants. That or it would feature in an episode of ‘Forensic Files’, years from now, and DNA experts and materials men would recreate the warm Hispanic features, as unskilled actors performed the crime in the black and white of ‘police think it happened like this’; and he would watch himself, or a version of himself, murder once again, from a suspect bench in a courtroom that would feel very much like drama. Life resembling art resembling life. How quick the transformation from a living, breathing, fucking person to this. To dust. Lost, dispersed, ever alone in the uncaring wilderness. He shivered dramatically. The sun had gone down, and the desert, though still warm, had become murky and frightening. Feeling suddenly absurd, Coakes stripped off his Summer jacket and carefully unbuttoned his shirt. He stood, clothes in hand, in just his shoes and socks. He howled.
He found himself clothed and riding through the nameless desert; the slung corpse of land scatter shot with hardy props of Deergrass, the plain flat and closing in with the falling night. He shivered again. On the radio a DJ buzzed amiably, his voice soothing, the words fusing together to a soft hail. He shook himself awake. The road wheeled forward beneath him, a grainy filmstrip in the coconut of light from the cars full beams.
He awoke.
A knock on the window. Some strange beast with crooked eyes and a Tibetan knitted cap, squinting sideways through the glass.
‘Y’awrite mister?’
He blinked himself awake and leaned forward to squint out a window frosted in the desert dawn. He was parked outside a gas station, on a rustic high street, all the wooden buildings orange in the fleer of morning.
A knock again, bucolic face pressed up against the glass.
‘Miser, you gonna purchase some gas or whit?’
He stepped on the break and twisted the key in the ignition. Nothing. He flinched, tried again. Through the window, the hick grinned at him. Stepping out into the kneading cold, he pushed past the man, and popped the bonnet. The engine had disappeared. He reeled back, blessed himself, and gaped up at the stranger, who’d walked around to inspect the damage.
‘Whooey!’
The man, forty something, heavy, with an oil stained overall and round distorted glasses, grinned at him amiably.
‘Looks like you’ll be stayin’ a while buddy.’
He turned and started toward the open belly of the gas station, twisted his head and yelled back over his shoulder.
‘I could probably fix you up sum sorta tempary injin. If ya care to come inside a spell.’
The driver stood in the frosty road, eyes on the gap where an engine should have been.
‘Clipton,’ said the garage attendant, wiping a hand dirtier on an oil soaked rag and thrusting it before him. The driver shook it mutely, his eyes wandering the tacky mural of hard core pornography that papered the gas stations pungent office. On one wall, under an interracial three way blowjob, a map of Britain hung unaccountably and askew. He walked over and let his eyes trace the route South from Edinburgh with a shaky finger.
‘Mister?’
He turned.
‘What might your name be?’
He started to answer, paused, reached again for the word, said… Nothing. It was gone. A gap where his he should be; an incomprehension on waking, prolonged. He lent against the wall shaking, despite the cramped rooms whirring space heater.
‘Mr?’
His eyes followed the map.
‘Peebles’, he whispered. Then louder, ‘Call me Peebles.’
Peebles shuddered as he choked down the ripe, lukewarm coffee. The diner was a ramshackle affair. To describe it as retro would have been to assume that it had ever changed. The deep unrepentant stains of hot fat and spilt coffee skinning every surface, told a different story. Peebles crinkled his mouth and peered through the muddy windows at the dirt track main street. He’d paid for the coffee with loose change, and it occurred to him now to root in his pocket for a wallet. No such luck. He rose to return to the garage and found his way blocked by a pretty girl, late teens, early twenties.
‘My hehaw keeps talkin to me.’ She said, deadpan, looking him straight in the eyes.
‘Excuse me,’ he replied, trying to move past her.
The girl stepped back, and blocked his way again.
‘It’s true,’ she said breathlessly. ‘My poontang will not stop speakin’ to me.’
Peebles stared at the girl. She was pretty, plainly dressed in gingham overalls. A costume which made her resemble a chorus girl from the musical Oklahoma. Quaint, but not obviously deranged.
‘Here,’ the girl said, as she grabbed his hand and shoved it firmly between her legs.
‘Yer a doctor aint ya? Could you tell me whit’s wrong?’
Peebles felt something twitch beneath his hand, snatched it back and pushed past the girl roughly, marching from the dirty restaurant into the street. The girl spilled after him, jabbering about salves and ointments. Peebles continued in the direction of the garage, ignoring her; stopped short, felt himself pulled off his feet, snapped back and down onto the dirt.
A face was looking down at him. A man, his features contorted somehow. Peebles scrambled backward and rose. The young man, the girl wrapped around him now, grinning, reached up and grabbed one handed at the swinging flesh of lips and jaw that hung loose off his head, revealing feet of sinew underneath. With his other arm he twisted the rubbery lips and spoke.
‘Eye ife axed you a quisthon.’
Peebles head stretched involuntarily back on the tight chords of his neck, and he gagged in revulsion. The man spoke again, drooling as he did so, feet of heavy spittle falling to the earth like piss.
‘Kin yo hell us docka? Eye ife ha the puky an I hah the mow, wheel bah.’
Peebles shook his head, looked at the girl imploringly.
‘Chud asked if you could help us doctor. We don’t hardly ever git a medical man out here.’
Peebles lifted his head and choked out, ‘Where the hell did you people get the idea I was a doctor? My car broke down, I’m just trying to get out of this nut hole.’
‘Yo ain’ a docka?,’ the disfigured man dropped his hands from his mouth, and it flopped before him, with palpable disappointment.
‘But Chud, if he ain’t a doctor, why’d you let him touch ma poon?’
‘Now look,’ Peebles began. Before he could finish, Chud had pummeled him to blackness.
Peebles awoke in a dim room. Through curtains at the foot of his bed, he could see the gloam of later evening. His jaw felt as if it had jumped from a plane with a malfunctioning parachute. Christ, he thought, freaks.
Peebles was propped up on lion skin pillows on what felt like a water bed. Through beaded curtains he could see a living room and kitchen, and something hot and lithe padding about.
Vaj, he thought, and licked his chapped lips. Then, Christ, how uncouth! I reacted like some kind of animal. He reached for some hint of memory, but his recall ended on streached back only as far as morning. Had he been injured? Peebles reached round to the back of his head, but could feel no lump. Perhaps it’s organic he thought, perhaps some sort of disease has eaten my memory, or alcoholism. Maybe I’ve left a message for myself. He checked his pockets. Empty. Maybe I’ve been tremendously clever and left messages explaining my condition, where I can’t miss them, inversely tattooed all over my body!
He rose swiftly and padded through the veil of beads. To his left a bathroom with a full length mirror sat tremendously conveniently, as if a lazy author had placed it there to suit some demonic destiny. By all that is sacred, Peebles thought, catching the first glimpse of himself in the mirror. He raised a shaky hand to his cheek and fell back hard onto the toilet. The man in the mirror looks like Rumpole of the Bailey might, if he’d lived a hard twenty years on skid row. Thin hair was combed forward over a wide forehead, bulging blood-shot eyes were hung like goldfish bowls in a wide smug face. The teeth, when grimaced, were yellow and brown, with flecks of green growing from under the gums.
As Peebles tore open his dress shirt, a wake of gray flesh broke unto his trousers, Weakly, he peeled them off. He was naked in the mirror, save for shoes, the clothes bundled about his feet like shed snake skin, an oddly familiar feeling. He was entirely free from tattoos.
The woman appeared in the doorway, and he turned imploringly, like an injured child. She was a dark skinned seraph, Hispanic, green eyed, a brunette, lyth in a too-short Summer dress.
‘Whell,’ she said, with a slight Latin American lisp, ‘You’re up.’
Indeed he was. From under a sea of glub flesh, a pale white-pudding bobbed. It was invisible from above, hidden under a swollen balloon of gut, but Peebles could feel it wiggle, observe its weak, bloodless struggle in the mirror.
‘Sorry,’ he gasped, through mouthfuls of tears.
‘Is ok,’ the woman said, taking his hand. ‘We’ve all got our problems.’
Gentle, like a sheppardess, she led him shuffling back to the bedroom. Peebles settled back on the bed, balling the leopard skin duvet under his hands.
‘Is hard I know,’ the woman said, ‘to be so far from home.’
Peebles nodded, sniffling, and the woman leant over him, smelling of coconut oil and salt water, and pulled open a bedside drawer. She lifted an old fashioned kerchief to his nose, and he blew enthusiastically; bubling the cotton with a greasy sludge.
‘There there,’ she said, folding the tissue away, and planting a soft kiss on his forehead.
‘Is all gonna be better soon.’
Peebles smiled up at her and began eagerly to suck his thumb. The woman smiled back sadly, and pulled a sheet up around his shoulders.
‘Looks like you has the baby,’ she said, and he coo’d in response, a soft repulsive sound.
‘Is a good thing I has the madre, el pequeño.’
Peebles pulled his knees up to his chest, and kicked off the bed sheet impishly. His big arms pawed the air, as if he were only now learning how to move. The woman looked down at the furred groin, half buried under folds of cellulite, sniffed.
‘Not for you my friend.’
His time had ended, and it was another kind of time which he had entered now. Like, she thought, the time a pig has to swill and grunt before he becomes bacon. Straightening her back, the woman reached over her head and pulled off her light sweatshirt. Underneath, her olive breasts were high and taught, and studded with the bells of milk bottle nipples, tens of them, growing out of the living flesh, like pumps hooked to a cows udder.
Peebles leaned forward all at once, and mouthed a teat, greedily milking the woman, his cheeks pumping like bellows. As he drank he began to shrink, wrinkling and deflating like a burst balloon. Soon all the remained visible was a set of suckling lips, buried in the rind of skin, like the scientific illustration of a boneless man. She laughed softly, and reaching forward, peeled apart the folds of papery skin. Beneath, the infant was pink, and mottled with a dust of dandruff, fragments of his former self. She reached inside the chrysalis, and lifted him up into the dusty air.
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